- Lived:
- born 1969, in a farming family near Tiruttani, Tamil Nadu → Bengaluru, Hawaii, Wisconsin, South Carolina → Hyderabad, where the life's work stands (living — verified as of September 2026)
- Field:
- vaccine science and biotechnology entrepreneurship — co-founder of Bharat Biotech, Hyderabad
- The Big Idea:
- India should not merely manufacture the world's vaccines under licence; it should invent its own — and price them so the poorest child on earth can have one.
- In their words:
- he has called Covaxin "India's nuclear moment" — a country proving it could do the whole thing itself (as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- A farmer's son with a doctorate in plant diseases came home to Hyderabad in 1996 and built the company that made the world's first globally cleared typhoid conjugate vaccine, a dollar-a-dose rotavirus vaccine, and India's first homegrown Covid vaccine — and when that last one was approved before its final trial results were in, India got a fierce, necessary argument about how fast a shield may be raised.